Impact of Dred Scott

The Dred Scott decision served as an eye-opener to Northerners who
believed that slavery was tolerable as long as it stayed in the South. If the
decision took away any power Congress once had to regulate slavery in new
territories, these once-skeptics reasoned, slavery could quickly expand into
much of the western United States. And once slavery expanded into the
territories, it could spread quickly into the once-free states. Lincoln
addressed this growing fear during a speech in Springfield, Illinois on June
17, 1858:

Put this and that together, and we have another nice little niche, which we
may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that
the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude
slavery from its limits. . . . We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the
people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall
awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave
State.
[32]

For many Northerners who had remained silent on the issue, this very real
possibility was too scary to ignore. Suddenly many Northerners who had not
previously been against the South and against slavery began to realize that if
they did not stop slavery now, they might never again have the chance. This
growing fear in the North helped further contribute to the Civil War.

Four years after Chief Justice Taney read his infamous Scott v.
Sandford decision, parts of the proslavery half of the Union had seceded
and the nation was engaged in civil war. Because of the passions it aroused on
both sides, Taney's decision certainly accelerated the start of this conflict.
Even in 1865, as the long and bloody war drew to a close with the Northern,
antislavery side on top, a mere mention of the decision struck a nerve in the
Northern Congress. A simple and customary request for a commemorative bust of
Taney, to be placed in a hall with busts of all former Supreme Court Chief
Justices, was blocked by the Republican-controlled Congress. Charles Sumner,
the leader of those who blocked the request, had strong words on the late Chief
Justice and his most notorious decision:

I speak what cannot be denied when I declare that the opinion of the Chief
Justice in the case of Dred Scott was more thoroughly abominable than anything
of the kind in the history of courts. Judicial baseness reached its lowest
point on that occasion. You have not forgotten that terrible decision where a
most unrighteous judgment was sustained by a falsification of history. Of
course, the Constitution of the United States and every principle of Liberty
was falsified, but historical truth was falsified also. . . .
[33]

Clearly Scott v. Sandford was not an easily forgotten case. That it
still raised such strong emotions well into the Civil War shows that it helped
bring on the war by hardening the positions of each side to the point where
both were willing to fight over the issue of slavery. The North realized that
if it did not act swiftly, the Southern states might take the precedent of the
Scott case as a justification for expanding slavery into new territories and
free states alike. The South recognized the threat of the Republican party and
knew that the party had gained a considerable amount of support as a result of
the Northern paranoia in the aftermath of the decision. In the years following
the case, Americans realized that these two mindsets, both quick to defend
their side, both distrustful of the other side, could not coexist in the same
nation. The country realized that, as Abraham Lincoln stated, "`A
house
divided against itself cannot stand.' . . . This government cannot endure,
permanently half slave and half free."
[34]
Scott's case left America in "shocks and throes and convulsions" that only the
complete eradication of slavery through war could cure.